Sheila Lamb | Cloquet, Minnesota
This interview was conducted by Ashley Tyner in July 2020. Angel Nwadibia and Talia Fox produced the written story. Annie Barthalomew and Khari Slaughter produced the video.
Sheila Lamb is an Indigenous City Councilor and environmental activist based in Minnesota. This is her story.
“I have dual ties and they're very different. One is my dad's side, which is White Earth Ojibwe. That’s why I love cedar trees so much. Part of the reason I bought my home was because the cedar trees are a medicine to us; they help to keep me grounded. My mom's side is Eastern Band Cherokee, with a lot of ties to the mountain. But both sides of my family come together with their ties to the water, because the water is our first medicine. I'm never happy unless I'm near water. I need to have that connection, to be able to talk to her and offer my tobacco, to just be near that medicine.
Key Facts
Offering tobacco is a “universal protocol among First Nations people.” The tobacco offerings are sometimes accompanied by other items including “blankets, cloth (print), guns or horses.” The practice of offering tobacco is often done whenever something is taken from Mother Earth (Strong Nations).
When I was a child, things were disconnected. I was raised in Alexandria, Virginia by a single mom. I was disconnected from my father's side of the family here in Minnesota. But my grandparents owned a farm in a rural community in a place called Stafford, Virginia. As a young child, I would wander in the fields and in the woods among the animals. I remember, at seven, I was sitting in a cedar grove in one of my grandparents’ fields and some very significant things happened to me. Sitting there with my back against one of the cedar trees, I dozed off and was shown a praying mantis sitting on my shoulder. And when I came back up to my grandparents’ home, as I reached for the screen door, there was a praying mantis right there again. And from that moment on, I realized that I was connected to everything around me.
I remember my grandmother talking to me about being Native. She was the only one that would really talk about it from that side of the family. My mom talked about how my great grandmother would say ‘don't tell them you're Indian because they'll kill you.’ When I reconnected with my dad's side, I found that they had very different points of view because they had grown up on the Rez [reservation]. Living on Rez myself felt like coming home.
Sheila speaking at a rally.
Key Facts
Standing Rock refers to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation inhabited by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, straddling the North and South Dakota borders. In 2016, Standing Rock was one of the proposed run-through sites of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Various communities, including the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, protested against the project that would have obstructed sacred grounds and polluted the region’s water resources. (Stand With Standing Rock).
Water protectors at Standing Rock were met with police violence (in the form of rubber bullets, tear gas and water cannons) during the demonstrations (The Guardian).
As of 2020, a federal court ordered that pipeline operations be shut down while the government conducts a full environmental assessment of the risks associated with the pipeline (Earth Justice).
Even though there's been hurtful times and hard times, I'm so grateful that I got to experience both worlds and both places. Had I not had my experience living on the east coast in my younger years, had I not had my experience living on the Rez, had I not had my experience in Standing Rock, I wouldn't be who I was today, and I wouldn't be able to do the work that I'm doing.
When I think about Standing Rock and the police department of Hennepin County, it becomes clear that police brutality and Indigenous people are pretty synonymous. This goes back to colonization, when police-type forces first came after Indigenous people. The atrocities committed by Hennepin County for the short time that they were in Standing Rock were brutal. I saw officers laughing as women and children were being chased down in vehicles. One day, I saw police break the arm of a 16-year-old girl while forcefully arresting her mother, an elder who suffers from arthritis. I have a 16-year-old daughter myself, and I can’t imagine a grown man being so willing to put his hands on my child and inflict pain. And it was painful to watch police do this to our elders, especially someone who has difficulty walking like this elder. She was manhandled without even being given adequate time to stand.
It's very easy for us to dwell on the atrocities that occurred at Standing Rock. But we need to also look at the beauty, because that is how we reclaim our energy. I think one of my most significant memories of being in Standing Rock was watching my children surrounded by tribes in a way that none of us ever imagined. We saw all these tribes united again and the beauty of Regalia and different prayers. We heard different songs and drums. It was such a healing time and it gave us a little window to look back at our ancestors—when it was just us. We connected to each other, to the Earth, to our past, and to our present all at once. That will always stick with me. I felt that we were so blessed to witness and be part of that historic, beautiful, heartbreaking, hopeful moment in time.
We were in prayer. We were in ceremony. We weren't being violent. I never once in all of my many months in Standing Rock participated in a single violent act. My stepson was maced and pepper sprayed and had water cannons thrown at him. So many of our young people ended up with PTSD because of the police brutality. The people that we thought were going to protect and to serve actually were the ones creating significant harm, and not just psychological harm, but physical harm.
It’s clear what the police were there for. Bismarck, an affluent community, didn't want the pipeline going through and damaging their water. But it was okay to put it within one mile of the only source of water for Indigenous people. And who did the police protect? They protected the pipeline. They protected those in Bismarck. They didn't protect those being harmed the most: the Indigenous people on Standing Rock Reservation.
So to me, Standing Rock is the epitome of police brutality for Indigenous people. We're racially profiled and targeted, whether it's for a speeding ticket or just being pulled over for no reason. We're not given the time and platform that we deserve, even though that would help people understand the true racism and brutality of these issues. I've watched a film of a Native American gentleman in a wheelchair being beaten by police, right here in Minnesota, in Duluth. Yes, the gentleman was intoxicated, but he was paralyzed, and he couldn't walk. Why was there a need to beat him in his chair? We see this kind of thing over and over again.
Key Facts
Life House. Since 1991, through the provision of housing, educational programs, and employment, Life House Duluth has been a safe haven for hundreds of homeless youth in Duluth, MN (Life House Duluth).
Harm against Indigenous women, girls, LGBTQ and Two-Spirit people has roots in the settler colonial histories of the Americas and continues to this day in both Canada and in the United States. The recent movement known as Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) builds upon this historical and ongoing reality to bring awareness to the violence perpetrated against Indigenous women and girls, as well as trans and two-spirit persons (Lakota Law Project).
The issue of MMIW intersects with fossil fuel infrastructure because the construction of pipelines typically occurs on Indigenous lands and is accompanied by a flood of male workers into the area. During the Bakken oil boom in North Dakota, for example, thousands of male workers moved into the area, correlating with a sharp increase of violence against Indigenous women (Indigenous Environmental Network).
Pipelines are an example of how environmental racism affects people of color, especially Indigenous communities, low-income communities, and African-American communities. Here in Minnesota, you’re going to see pipelines pretty much on every reservation. Companies will go places where there will be less resistance. They’ll make these very fruitful deals from a financial perspective, but they aren't looking at the harm that environmental racism brings. It's important to always make the connections between environmental justice, social justice, and racial justice. You really can't separate the three at any time. When you have an issue with one, you're going to find that you have an issue with all three.
After Standing Rock, I started working with Minnesota 350 and a place called Life House in Duluth. Through Life House, we have a safe house called Soul House that deals with trafficked and at-risk women from the ages of 13 to 20. Through that work and through a strong friendship with Christine Stark, a sex trafficking survivor and advocate, I ended up getting more involved in the issue of sex trafficking. I began to see the way that sex trafficking was intertwined with the other issues I had been working on. It's like building links in a chain. Every time you connect a new link you can't separate it. You can't unsee it.
For example, I always make a connection with things like sex trafficking, domestic violence, and missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW). The issue hit me in a more profound way than ever during Standing Rock due to the sheer numbers of Indigenous women who went missing or ended up dead. They tried to make us believe that that issue was isolated from the pipeline construction. But the more I learned and experienced people I knew suddenly go missing, like one of my own cousins who was murdered, the more I knew that these incidents weren’t isolated. When I started running for city council here in Cloquet, one of the issues brought to my attention in my ward from some teachers and a social worker was the fact that we had 13-year-old Native girls being trafficked right here. It was an eye-opener. There was even a Canadian inquiry that proved extractive industries and sex trafficking go hand-in-hand. We have Enbridge coming through the area potentially with Line 3, and we have to think ahead!
As we move forward on the MMIW task force, we need to keep policing where it belongs so we don't have another officer that's part of a sex trafficking ring, and we don't have another extractive industry that comes in and treats our women as a disposable commodity. The sad part is there's so much overlap between the systemic racism and environmental racism… It is just daunting. But it makes us dig in harder because we believe we can bring about change. Working together, we can put a stop to these things and create a better world for future generations.
Key Facts
A study performed by the Suicide Prevention Resource-Center found that the suicide rates among Indigenous populations were the highest compared to all other racial and ethnic groups in the US, at 21.39 per every 100,000 people (Vertava Health). Such drastic rates are the manifestations of the deep-rooted inter-generational trauma caused by a history of colonization, poverty, and social exclusion (The Conversation).
The Youth Climate Intervenors are a group of 13 young people who won the right to represent themselves in the case against the Line 3 tar sands pipeline (Youth Climate Intervenors).
When I think about the future, our youth give me hope. Standing Rock began because of youth bringing attention to suicide, which is extremely high among Indigenous people and African Americans. I think of my own children, and I see activism in them already. With Line 3, I was an expert witness for the Youth Climate Intervenors. It was the first time a group of youth got to go into court hearings about a big project like this, and they blew me away with their strong arguments. They created change—they stopped this project. The youth is where our hope is, and I'm so honored and blessed when they want to talk and listen. That's where the real change is going to come from, because they're more awake than my generation and the generations before us.
When it comes to the work that lies ahead of us, I think that we need to learn to understand each other, and really listen. It's when we actively listen and participate in that conversation that we can find the commonalities and build from there. That’s sustainability. Let's really unify as a nation, as a people, and embrace each other's differences and uniqueness, and let’s love that about one another! Those different perspectives generate new ideas and help us grow.
I don't want the next generation to live in a world of fear, but instead a world of peace and love and spirituality and care—and when I say care, it's not just for human beings. It’s for all of the world as a whole and everything that we've been blessed with and been given. Our children and our grandchildren for generations to come don't have to make the same mistakes. They don't have to have riots to be heard. They have a voice because we’ve given them that platform, that avenue, that truth. And only then can we have this beautiful gathering of humanity without the suffering, without the hurt, without the bitterness, without the anger, without the lies. We become whole together. So, if I had to sum it up into just one small phrase—my hope is that the world be filled with compassion and love again. That one makes me tear up because I feel it in every part of me.
Ready to take action? Here’s what you can do:
Learn about the efforts against Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two Spirit people (MMIWG2S).
Learn about the proposed Line 3 Replacement Line here.
Sign the pledge to Stop the Line 3 Oil Pipeline!